When she wasn’t working out physically, she was hitting the books. The Ferraros were intelligent. That was apparent in their conversations. They spoke several languages. They could converse easily on just about any subject. She immediately set out to catch up on her education, at first in order to be able to converse with them, but then because her mind became thirsty for knowledge. There were apps on her phone, and she went to bed every night speaking other languages and woke in the morning practicing them.
Leaning against the wall for support, Nicoletta forced her chin up and made herself look out of the shadows and really focus on the room and every individual. Clariss was on the floor, crawling toward the exit. No one seemed to be aware of her. There were bodies on the floor and a great deal of blood. She knew she should be bothered by that, and there was a part of her that was upset that she wasn’t. Living with her step-uncles had changed something in her.
She searched the room for the one person who mattered most to her. Taviano. He moved from shadow to shadow, and even she couldn’t see him until he emerged behind a fallen shooter and took the gun from his hand. He rose up as a man approached, the weapon extended. Taviano shot him at least three times, point-blank.
Her heart in her throat, Nicoletta caught sight of Jorge, the one other person she recognized from the concert. He had been with Armando, chasing after her. Clearly, he had begun to make his way toward the exit of the warehouse, near where she was, just as he’d done at the hotel, but he turned back when he saw Taviano.
She had no choice. Her body had to work. Nicoletta launched herself out of the shadow, rolling in a tight somersault, to come up under Jorge’s gun arm. She slammed her head under his chin, driving upward using her entire body, her heels and knees, nearly lifting him off his feet. At the same time, she used her fingers to force his hand open, hitting his pressure points so his fingers spasmed and the gun fell to the floor. She kicked it away and followed Jorge as he fell away from her, driving her stiff fingers into the dent at the base of his throat, imagining them coming out the other side of his neck.
She pulled back as he went down to his knees, coughing. She kicked him hard in the solar plexus and then spun around when she felt hands on her waist.
“Piccola, it’s just me. Slip back into the shadows.” Taviano stood in front of Jorge with Santiago’s gun. “We can’t have evidence that we were here, although you saved my life. Let me finish this.”
He spoke gently, as if she might shatter—or condemn him because he was going to pull the trigger on Jorge, the man who would have killed him. She could pull the trigger. Would that make Taviano think less of her? Because she wasn’t that compassionate woman, her heart soft and concerned with how to help the poor boys who lived such a bad life that they joined gangs and decided raping girls and selling them was a great pastime and way to make money. She was never going to be that woman. Never. She wasn’t going to pretend to be, either.
She did just what he said, walking back, skirting around two dead men to get to the corner where the dark shadow lay like a stripe leading out of the warehouse. Once she was at the mouth of the shadow, she watched as Taviano made his way back to where Santiago was. He lined up the shot so it looked as though the New Yorker had actually fired the gun that had killed Jorge. She locked that information in her mind. It was another detail that couldn’t be forgotten. That was how the Ferraros kept away from police attention. They made certain that everything added up for forensics. Taviano replaced the gun carefully in Santiago’s open palm exactly as it had been when he removed it and then he rode the shadow back to Nicoletta.
He looked around the warehouse. “Do you see any cameras? I interrupted all transmissions, but I could have missed something.”
She should have thought about that. Stefano had told her more than once that she always had to pay attention to cameras on the street. When she walked down a street, he wanted her to practice noticing how many businesses had them. Which ones were real and which were fake. Could she concentrate on them and stop them from recording? She’d never tried something like that, and she’d thought he was crazy until Ricco had demonstrated.
Secretly, she’d begun trying to stop a small recording device she had. She’d managed to interrupt it a grand total of three times for all of two seconds. She’d been proud of herself until Stefano had sternly told her to keep it up, that she needed to be able to knock out cameras for long blocks of time if need be. She didn’t understand how being able to have that kind of control would come in handy until this moment. Now she wished she’d spent more time on practicing and less time on sleeping. It just seemed that she often fell into bed exhausted after long training sessions.